Elsewhere

Download

LEGAL NOTICE: You're granted the license to freely use Perfgraph.
You may not redistribute, sell or re-sell it. Anything else you do with it is at your sole
responsibility. The creator or publisher cannot be held liable for any damages, direct or indirect,
that result from the use of this software. By running the software you agree to be bound
by these terms.

Important Note

This version of Pergraph has been replaced by Perfgraph 3.0. This page remains for archival purposes only.

Perfgraph 2.0

If you like to know what's going on inside your computer at any point in time, you will love Perfgraph.

Perfgraph is a CPU/memory/network utilization monitor. It is implemented as an Explorer toolbar so it does not necessarily take up space from your desktop.

Perfgraph will run on both x86 and x64 versions of Windows XP or later.

Perfgraph is an extension to the Taskbar and runs within the explorer.exe process. It will monitor the activities you select, and draw pretty graphs with a user-configurable refresh speed - adjustable between .02 seconds and one hour. It is extremely versatile: for example, as shown below, Perfgraph can blend in very well.
The Windows XP taskbar on the screenshot has Perfgraph dragged to the bottom, showing CPU utilization in green:

A simple setup(click to enlarge)

Of course if you have the screen real estate to spare, you can display larger graphs, and several of them at the same time:

Perfgraph on Vista with a 30" display(click to enlarge)

Finally, if you have a spare monitor hooked up to your system and you're not doing much with it regularly, you might as well cover its desktop with Perfgraph charts:

Perfgraph on dedicated monitor(click to enlarge)

Download

LEGAL NOTICE: You're granted the license to freely use Perfgraph.
You may not redistribute, sell or re-sell it. Anything else you do with it is at your sole
responsibility. The creator or publisher cannot be held liable for any damages, direct or indirect,
that result from the use of this software. By running the software you agree to be bound
by these terms.

Install

Run the setup file contained within the zip archive. After installation, a default Perfgraph monitor should appear on your taskbar. You can summon more Perfgraph monitors by right-clicking your taskbar and selecting "Perfgraph" from the "Toolbars" submenu.

To uninstall Perfgraph, use the Add/Remove Programs (XP) or Programs and Features (Vista) control panel applet. Don't forget to close the Perfgraph toolbar before you do so.

If you are upgrading from an earlier release you should uninstall the previous version first.

Using Perfgraph

Usage should be fairly straightforward. Right-click the Taskbar (or any other Explorer toolbar) and select
Perfgraph from the Toolbars menu to start a new Perfgraph instance. To access the configuration screen,
double-click any visible Perfgraph toolbar. (Note: configuration settings are on a per-instance basis.
Changing any of the options for a graph will not affect other instances.) Right-click a Perfgraph toolbar
and select "New Perfgraph instance" from the menu that appears to add another graph to Explorer.

Microsoft disabled dragging toolbars from the Taskbar to the desktop on Vista, but you can still achieve the
same result with a bit of trickery: first, create an empty folder on your desktop. Drag this
folder to the very ednge of your screen. It will turn into a toolbar, and right-clicking it will allow you to call
up Perfgraph from the Toolbars menu. Once Perfgraph is visible, right-click it and uncheck "New Folder" (or whatever your folder was called) in
the Toolbars menu. You can then freely drag the Perfgraph-only toolbar around the screen. Note that to undock a toolbar from the edge of the screen on Vista,
you can't just grab it anywhere in its nonclient area, you need to move your mouse to the very edge of the screen to be able to start the drag operation.

To move a graph to the desktop, you can simply drag it from the taskbar if you're using Windows XP. If you then leave
the graph in the middle of the screen it will turn into a floating toolbar. If you drag it to any edge of the screen, it will
dock itself.

If you have trouble resizing or dragging Perfgraph, make sure the "Lock the Taskbar" option is not selected in the Taskbar context menu.

Double-clicking a Perfgraph toolbar will bring up a configuration dialog:

Configuring Perfgraph(click to enlarge)

The dialog allows you to change what is being monitored, how frequently the graph is updated, what colors are used, and it also provides a number of target-specific options.

Perfgraph will use Explorer's built-in serialization features, which means that your settings and graph layouts are only saved when you close Explorer cleanly, for example by logging off.

Future improvements

I would be quite interested in adding support for other interesting performance information - motherboard sensors such as fan speeds and more importantly, temperatures, come to mind.
I haven't been able to dig up any useful information on acquiring this data via the SMBUS driver (probably because I did not look hard enough), so if you have some documentation (or better yet, sample code) that you're willing to share, email
me at marton at logmein dot com.

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